It is a question that has left Egyptologists stumped after coming across the tomb in the Mount Anubis necropolis in Abydos. Lying west of the River Nile, Abydos is one of the most sacred sites from Ancient Egypt and is the burial spot for the civilisation’s founding kings.
An Egyptian-American archaeological mission from the University of Pennsylvania in the USA made the 3,600-year-old discovery alongside a complete Roman-era pottery workshop in the village of Banawit to the north of Abydos.
Buried underground by some 23 feet, or seven metres, the burial chamber is made of limestone and covered with mudbrick vaults. Thought to be 16 feet high when constructed, it stood at a height of five metres.
The burial chamber (Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities)
Dr. Mohamed Ismail Khaled, Secretary-General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, emphasised the importance of these two discoveries.
“The discovery of the royal tomb in Abydos provides new scientific evidence on the development of royal tombs in the Mount Anubis necropolis, which dates back to the Abydos Dynasty, a series of kings who ruled Upper Egypt between 1700 and 1600 BC,” the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities said in a statement on the find.
The much more famous Temple of Seti I, located nearby and also in Abydos (Getty Stock Images)
But who is the lost Pharaoh? No idea is the general take at this moment no time.
What we do know is that their reign dates back to the Second Intermediate Period, which was from 1640 BC to 1540 BC. Back then, northern Egypt was ruled by a group called the Hyksos and the southern part of Egypt was controlled by multiple Egyptian kings, LiveScience reports.
At that period of time Abydos was under Egyptian control. But the control of who, we do not know.
Findings from the Roman pottery shop also discovered by the team (Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities)
Josef Wegner, a professor of Egyptology and Egyptian archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania who led the team, said: “The king’s name was originally recorded in painted scenes on plastered brickwork that decorated the underground entrance to the limestone burial chamber.
“However, the hieroglyphic texts were damaged by ancient tomb robbers and not enough survives to read the king’s name.”
The style of the decorations and texts is similar to those previously discovered in the tomb of King Senebkay, who ruled between 1650 BC and 1600 BC.
hieroglyphics in the Temple of Rameses II at Abydos – nothing like what was found in the recent discovery (Getty Stock Images)
Sadly, the tomb was ransacked a long tie ago by grave robbers. Not even the king’s mummified remains were left in the tomb or their sarcophagus.
Despite this, Anna-Latifa Mourad-Cizek, an assistant professor of Egyptian archaeology at the University of Chicago, said it was a ‘highly significant’ find given there is a limited amount of evidence about the rulers of this region of Ancient Egypt.
At the nearby Roman pottery site also uncovered, a number of burials were found at the site including mud-brick tombs containing skeletons and mummies, likely representing family graves for men and women, most of whom were children.
The find comes after a recent archaeological discovery hidden beneath Egyptian pyramids that, according to experts on the case, changes everything about how we think of the four-sided structures.
